The technical development of Weir Minerals’ GEHO® constructive displacement pumps has ensured they play a key function in reducing mines’ environmental footprint.
The GEHO® pump vary is well-known in numerous pumping purposes together with tailings, backfill, ore transportation and dewatering. Weir Minerals Global Product Manager for GEHO® optimistic displacement (PD) pumps, Erik Vlot, highlights the pumps’ ability to pump highly viscous slurry, permitting mines to conserve water. The power efficiency of pipeline transportation additionally helps minimize energy costs and reduces mines’ carbon footprint.
“The basis of GEHO pumps’ success is our ongoing attention to technical innovation and enchancment,” says Vlot. “This also allowed us to be pioneers in the pumping of very acidic material at high temperatures, such as nickel slurry at greater than 200°C at a mine in Madagascar.”
With their excessive capability, GEHO® pumps transport bauxite or iron ore over lots of of kilometres, providing one of the value effective and sustainable switch strategies available to the mining industry. These pumps have additionally performed an integral function within the success of a Weir Minerals paste solution at Finland’s largest open pit mine. digital pressure gauge ’s Siilinjärvi mine uses GEHO® pumps to maneuver tailings from the plant, achieving the required seashore slope on its tailings facility to satisfy its life-of-mine strategy.
Backfilling is a vital methodology for mining to realize safety and environmental goals, and GEHO® pumps have been enabling this work. In a North American platinum operation, the gear pumps over a thousand litres a minute of this viscous backfill materials – measuring 70% solids by weight – back into the mine’s labored out areas.
In the context of deep mines, GEHO® pumps provide an efficient and reliable way of dewatering from great depths, instead of using multiple smaller pumps to transfer water to surface. The powerful GEHO® pump vary can do this by pumping from the underside of a mine to the floor in only one carry – even over kilometres.
“Apart from the cost effectiveness of this solution, an essential benefit is that it reduces the risk of one pump in a pumping chain failing, and disrupting the entire dewatering perform,” he says. “It additionally reduces the price and upkeep necessities of having multiple pumping stations at totally different ranges inside the mine.”
The popularity of GEHO® pumps has also been constructed on their reliability, he explains. This has resulted from Weir Minerals’ ongoing analysis and development into its pumps’ put on elements. This process is predicated on an in-depth understanding of the whole pumping system during which the pump operates.
“Taking into account how our pumps interact with these techniques, we focus on key aspects of the pumps such because the diaphragm and propelling liquid system,” he says. The propelling liquid offers the barrier between the piston and the diaphragm guaranteeing that all the moving components transfer in oil and never slurry.
He emphasises the importance of diaphragm dynamics and the need to control the amount of propelling liquid within the chamber. This is completed via the PLC control, to make sure that the diaphragm runs in the proper place.
“Rubber is sweet at bending, but when it stretches it could tear,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the substitute intervals between diaphragm replacements, serving to mines to cut back both their downtime and their complete value of ownership.”
The monitoring of GEHO® pumps’ operation is carried out via digital know-how so that operators can keep abreast – in real time – of the pump’s efficiency and condition. Weir Minerals’ digital layer for these pumps is being rolled out to prospects, informing the maintenance schedules and enhancing pump availability.
Vlot notes that Weir Minerals continues to innovate with the GEHO® pump vary, and is even exploring possibilities for transferring coarse ore to the surface from deep in a mine – as a less expensive option to traditional hoisting methods.
“Vital to all our GEHO pump solutions is the Weir Minerals’ international service community, guaranteeing that wherever our pumps are operating there shall be an experienced local service crew to assist them,” he concludes.
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